SEO 101

Opportunity

• 3.3 billion Google searches daily

• In the past year, 71% of the traffic to denver.org

came through organic search

• Google’s travel study says that leisure travelers are

turning to search engines as their first step in trip

planning

• Search engines are used in all stages of planning a

trip from researching locations to booking hotels

SEO: Why We Care

SEO: Why We Care Contd.

Reference: http://skift.com/2015/08/03/4-charts-that-show-the-growth-of-mobile-search-for-leisure-travelers/

Keywords

The first step is picking out the keywords you would like your site to rank for. This will be the focus of your optimizations.

Google Adword’s keyword planner tool can help you decide which keywords to go after.

Search Engine Results Page

Search Engine Results Page: Mobile and Local

• Frequently check the mobile search landscape as travelers are frequently using their phones to see what is around them

• For best results, make sure your Google + Business Profile is filled out using keywords

To determine what a page is about and a page’s reputation, Google looks at:• Crawlability• On Page Elements• Off Page Elements

And acquiring higher search engine rankings and authority involves• Technical site elements• On page optimization• Off page promotion

How Google Thinks

• Google bots crawl the web for new or updated content

• Google bots read HTML to find out what the page is about

• Google serves up relevant, personalized results

• The algorithm considers: where the searcher is, searchers intent, search history, social extensions

Crawlability & Technical Site Elements

In order for Google bots to be able to crawl a website, it must be healthy. Some of the first things to consider are:

• Pages are indexed with Google Webmaster tools using an XML or HTML sitemap

• No duplicate pages• Fast site load time• No server errors

On Page Elements and Optimization

Title Tag

Copy with internal

links

H1

H2

Image alt text

In order for Google to rank your page it must first know what it’s about. There are many ways to tell Google what your page is about.

• Title Tag: Should be between 50 and 65 characters and contain priority keywords and company name

• Image Alt Text: Should tell what the image is• H1 and H2: Title of the article

Off Page Elements & Off Page Promotion

Inbound links help build Authority and Reputation

Reputation: • Anchor text of the link, or the link’s surrounding text

• Reputation of the linking site

Authority: • Overall “power” of linking site achieved via all of their inbound links, domain history, internal architecture, and several other factors.

• Social Media platforms and PR outlets can send signals to search engines about important SEO landing pages

THANK YOU!